My father’s cousin Trevor was murdered
by a woman, his lover. One long Brooklyn summer,
when she finally had enough. This ol’ ting, daddy says,
gazing at the sweat on his glass. His mind swimming
in the memory. My father says, she had a low sly
waist, a brazen jaw, a lazy brass laugh like a long time jamete. The sort daddy, his brothers, and his cousins
kept company with before he met his true love, before
he left his badjohn life behind.

The story goes that this nameless woman paid
two young tough yardie-boys from around the Flatbush
streets, to grab Trevor from a new lover’s front door,
to bind him still wearing his Saturday night finery
to a gold and white dining room chair, to beat on him
until, the way I’m told, some small bones chipped and
some snapped and he begged.

The beg. Let’s turn up the music here so we hear
what we must. The please-baby-baby-please is spoken
in the tongue of every country and when it’s uttered
can fill up a woman on a Saturday night so much, her
splintered heart almost doesn’t know how many places
it’s cracked or how little it can ever hold again. So maybe,
when she entered the room, all dressed up for the night
herself, maybe Trevor thought he’d paid in pain and pleas.

But the way the story’s told across our table at dinner,
she already started to spot the cracks he’d left behind
and she stabbed him then, twenty-one perfect
ice pick punctures to his heart, shoulder, his thick throat,
to the rope of hernia that had started to slow the wild and
the wandering of his body. But Trevor’s hardly the point.

Thirty years gone since he slumped in that chair and
bled out slow as she held his head against her chest
the way she had when they did it for love. Thirty years since
they dragged her out the front door of the Flatbush squat
she’d worked three jobs to keep (two on her knees but
that’s not the point either) and the slight and bladed smiles
on her face, each widened the spray of blood and I think
she must have said his name again
and again, like the strange litany a woman makes the moment
before she comes undone for a man.

Everyone believes she did it for love but the first time
my father mentions his cousin, Trevor, he looks me in the eye,
he says, didn’t I ever tell you? That woman killed him.
I believe that boy just made a fool of her, one time too many.
—And it’s not strange that no one at dinner remembers her name
or where her people came from, what town or island, what
stark insanity, what grey prison holds her now. Just that she
wore a dress, to do slow murder: tight, brown with animal spots,
my father adds, and she kept her shoes on the whole time.